


Etiquette for International Businessmen

by glittersnipe



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Drug Use, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:40:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 16,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25161016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittersnipe/pseuds/glittersnipe
Summary: It's 2009, and Kendall is in Shangai, and he's, well -- he's fucked.
Relationships: Siobhan "Shiv" Roy/Tom Wambsgans
Comments: 56
Kudos: 47





	1. Chapter 1

The night before his flight out he couldn’t sleep and the plane didn’t help the way it normally did. He was awake the whole time before he touched down in Hong Kong International Airport, still drunk when he landed. The plane (“Air Fuck One”, via Roman; he fucking loathed that stupid name alongside his piece of shit brother, but like shit and brother both, it clung) was suddenly miraculously fucking busy all the time, alongside his dad’s schedule, all of a sudden, so: he was first class commercial, but on Etihad so could be worse, but what did it mean that he didn’t get the plane. Who got the plane instead? He accepted every refill. He watched shitty mindless TV on the larger-than-business-class-got screen and got progressively more shitfaced. Normally after a drink or two he could sleep: he was used to sleeping on planes, and he was usually exhausted.

Instead, here he was reclining on the lie-flat mattress--a real innovation for the Modern Business Asshole--and he was drinking double-tequila sodas in the plastic-smelling quiet of his cleverly-designed first-class cube. The attendant attended. He was entombed in the luxury of business travel, distinguishable by an almost total lack of interpersonal interaction. After the fourth double, he was drunk enough to try and be charming to the attendant, who greeted him with the same blankly tolerant face that staff who were aware of who he was presented to him. The same slight smile, the deferential nod, no matter how much of an asshole he made of himself, no matter how well he tipped. He tried being charming; tried being an asshole; even tried “being himself”, whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean: but it all glanced off impenetrable staff, each made identical by their face, their compensation that ensured the same discreet indulgence of his whims -- only the best for you. You both fungible and yet existing within specific and enclosed boundaries. The hum of the conditioned air and the purifiers working doubletime gave the expensive silence some texture.

It was 2009 and he was being sent to Shanghai. For the last decade Waystar -- alongside more or less everyone, dinosaurs like GE through to shitty Google tech brats -- had been heavily investing in China’s next billion customers, in permanently normalised trade relations, working with whingeing human rights activists (Dad had played it sincere to surprisingly strong effect). They’d pushed it through, and there had been intense investment during the Bush era, everyone was scrambling for the piece of the pie. But since the crash, there’d been pressure, obscure domestic monetary and trade reform within the Chinese government. Beijing were getting shittier with regulations. The rumour was Google was failing. He was nervous. But Dad wanted a theme park in China, he wanted Waystar Royco IP front and fucking centre, he wanted the footprint expanded. With a phalanx of McKinsey consultants, creative were repurposing and sinofying Waystar’s western mascots for maximal relatability. And if he succeeded, he’d get Cruises, so he couldn’t fuck this up.

Except he couldn’t sleep, so he got shittier and shittier, relaxing into the emotional lability that passed for feeling after enough mid-shelf tequila. He tried to call Shiv, to whom he hadn’t spoken in at least a year but whom he thought fondly about when he was drunk, his baby sister, but his credit card was rejected by the machine and he immediately felt relieved. He tried flirting with the attendant, who metaphorically rejected his credit card while never breaking her pleasant torpor. He watched more shitty TV, he drank more. He tried to sleep. When it was time to get off the plane, his bodyguard held a little more of his body weight than was necessarily appropriate. Like a parcel he was gently escorted from plane cube through passport control through the large shining halls of Shanghai Pudong International airport and then he was seamlessly borne into the oblong interiors of his limo, where he stared into his iPhone. Safari stuttered and reloaded, struggling with the VPN. The screen blinked white when it reloaded. It was night and the interior lights made the windows opaque rectangles.

There was a full bar and, feeling both mischievous and wildly disoriented, he poured himself a drink. He could barely remember switching containers but now he was in a car going who-knows-where-the-fuck. He had the sudden but violent urge to open the door and throw himself out. He tried to talk to the chauffeur, who rebuffed him with the same expression as the flight attendant. He reminded himself that he could fire them, any one of them, at any point; he felt ashamed that he hadn’t already, that he wasn’t like Dad. He couldn’t command them but he also couldn’t punish them, he could never punish them -- when he was child he had the status, supposedly; but the house staff who’d allegedly been poached from the Vanderbilts, they earned their keep at home and were useful and made Dad happy; and as Dad would often ask, how did he earn his keep, exactly? -- he trembled with impotent rage, unable to do anything at all. All meanwhile the chauffeur stared ahead placidly. He convulsed with resentment, and feeling freed by the intolerability of coming in after the servants, even the ones Dad hadn’t been fucking, he drank some shitty Suntory import whiskey, and another, and then he threw the Waterford crystal against the floor of the limo. The glass bounced off the plush carpeted floor and wobbled back onto its base. He looked at it, rolling around in the footwell. He smiled and closed the aperture, sealing out the driver. He picked up his sportcoat, and rolled it into a careful ball, and shrieked into it until his throat gave out and he had no choice but to be quiet again. The walls of the limousine did their job, kept the sound inside.

The corporate housing had a bar that was almost definitely manufactured by the same people who did the limo bar. Beyond caring much now, he drank a vodka in Perrier with a squeeze of lime, appreciating that they had limes, good gwailou soda water. He was well and truly shitfaced by now and had been deposited and had vaguely intuited a conversation between the person delivering him and the person receiving him along the lines of: Check on him to see if he pukes in his sleep. He toed his loafers off. The windows had been shuttered against the city outside. The pile of the carpet was thick. The decor were tasteful and midcentury. The firm that kept their executive housing maintained fluffy towels, a suite of international channels, a tasteful orchid on the granite countertops. The alarms had been upgraded to iPhone docks.

He laid in bed in the freshly-laundered sheets, cradled ambiently in a perfect 71 degrees, but still unable to sleep. He tried to focus: on the org charts he’d been memorising, the projections, the latest from Beijing. Three hours later it was 5:30am. He went to the in-building gym and ran 10 miles and threw up in the shower and drank some Soylent, which every corporate gym was stocked with per his instructions, and then threw that up too and drank a glass of water that finally stuck. He watched CNN as the dawn broke and showered and shaved and did a shot of whiskey and brushed his teeth and got a coffee, and went into the office and gave a speech he’d been rehearsing for weeks with self-directed strategic talking points for the new era of Waystar Royco entertainment he’d been hoping to surprise Dad with: yeah, the theme parks and the still-largely-untapped Chinese entertainment market, but also: mobile-first, apps, exponential potential revenue growth thanks to aggressive investment in rapidly-cheapening cloud -- a total fucking killing in platform-first infrastructure. And now, feeling himself: he was funny, he was fucking crushing, they were cheering -- in fact not only would they seize the opportunity but Waystar Royco were going to lead the West’s charge, and there was even a chance to expand into offshoring manufacture, to semiconductors, own the whole supply chain -- though here he acknowledged urbanely, that might be a tough one politically, even for him, you know. I’m not a miracle worker folks. Just an ordinary guy -- here he spread his hands modestly -- but this guy -- two thumbs to his chest -- believes in the company, and in my Dad.

He was pouring himself a congratulatory whiskey in the prestocked bar when Dad called him to call him a fucking moron. His assistant was in the room. He dug his fingers into his thighs. He had no idea how much of his humiliation was intelligible. He drank the shot when she left the room and went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth and tore one of his fingernails down to the quick, then went out to be introduced to the Shanghai office VPs, smiling and inclining his head he had learned from his Etiquette for International Businessmen book. He went to lunch where no one drank so he didn’t. He met the President of Entertainment, China, who was a white guy named Greg and whom he’d understood to be making a “lateral” move as Operations VP for APAC, i.e. reporting to him going forward -- but who was apparently actually staying in Shanghai rather than go to Singapore like literally every APAC regional exec. After the speech that morning, Greg had been instructed to stay in Shanghai. He had been told, he said with the kind of shrugging Australian confidence that’s malicious in its heartiness, to stay on and help Kendall settle in. He’d been told by Logan. Who had called him directly.

Around him the office suite could have been the New York office. The grey jaws of the skyscrapers strained towards the same grey sky. The conference room tables were the same shining mahogany, atop which sat his and Greg’s identical iPhones.

It was his last meeting. In the limo he sat as though stunned by a blow. His humiliation approached hysteria. He got home. He poured a drink. He ordered pizza. He ate half a slice and felt like a pig and went to the gym instead where ten minutes into his session he swung at the bag too wildly and felt something rip itself agonisingly apart in his right shoulder. The doctor arrived and shot him full of Demerol and told him in excellent English that he’d torn his rotator cuff. He asked for a Demerol prescription and he got it. The doctor left. He took more Demerol and poured himself a drink. The scalding core of the humiliation, lingering: it just kept happening, and he never knew whether he’d screwed up so badly that it was his fault, or whether Dad had ever seriously intended to let him have it -- although that was his fault too, really, at the heart of it.

When he woke up the sky was grey again and he had pissed himself. His laptop was open on the table, the screen powered on, and -- fuck -- his inbox open. He took a breath and made himself look: He had written an email to Greg re: having a bit too much fun punchin’ the ol’ bag!, and that, given his inability to use his right hand, he’d be taking the remainder of the week off. Aside from a minor and embarrassing tangent about his fighting weight, in which he’d conveyed that he was in a heavier category than he actually was, the email was thankfully lucid -- but Dad was going to fucking kill him all the same and this time the fault would be obvious. He stood up and took his pants off and went into the kitchen and paused for a second, but he wasn’t sick, just shaking. He dried his legs off with the tasteful linen dish towels embroidered w/ Chinese characters for love, devotion, filial piety, the last of which he saved for his balls. Beside his dead phone flashing the battery symbol was a Hennessy bottle. It was emptier than he expected. The empty interior of the bottle, the space between glass amber cognac, was like -- how awkward, just can’t seem to remember if I spilled some or if I tried to off myself. It was either really bad or totally meaningless.

Well and so there he was: he looked out and the sun wasn’t rising, after all. He rested his forehead against the cool glass. The Shanghai smog turned the setting sun into blazing ribbons of light, threaded through the dark shadows rising from concrete depths where cars blared and the people shouted below. The luminous slivers narrowed. The executive suite was tastefully furnished in an Industrial modern-meets Scandiavian style: plush Beni Ourain rugs over polished walnut floors, flat, angular surfaces. Single white sculpted vases overhung with glossy fake leaves; poured concrete detail and an Edison bulb screwed into the wall. He could have been in an airport bar in Stockholm or Tokyo. He felt the sweaty meat of his incoherent head cooled by the flat hardness. He felt contained by the glass. He looked at the bottle. There were so many people out there, down below, who didn’t even know who Dad was. And nobody who knew who he was. The people outside didn’t know or care what was in the buildings. He went back to the coffee table. He took more Demerol. He drank some Hennessy. The last slivers of sun failed. He felt good. He wanted to party. So much for fucking Cruises! he said to himself, impersonating his psyche-up voice. Time to climb on board the SS Shitfaced.

The front desk was accommodating. An hour later there were girls in his apartment, which he hadn’t specifically asked for, and whose presence put him on edge; it induced a manic performative drive to prove that he could be charming and likeable on his own merits, and which usually had the exact opposite effect; his obsession with not seeming sleazy had similarly repellent effects, but then again -- you’re always charming when you’re writing the cheque. But the girls were part of the whole deal and he wanted the whole deal and he wanted his guests to think he was getting what he wanted, that he already had it. He wanted to feel like the fucking success he was. He was a playboy mogul. The magazines (well, one) had compared him to Tony Stark. He was smart, he’d been to Harvard -- he’d gotten in -- but he liked to have a little fun, to cut loose. He could forget the asterisk over his achievements, hovering eternally overhead. He could believe he was that person.

The girls were willow-thin and sharp shouldered; they drank bright cocktails from the bar staffed by a guy in a tux that he didn’t remember sending for. The apartment was filling up with largely foreigners: Lehman Bros survivor bros, scraping for investors; London City boys exiled from even Hong Kong, which was truly pathetic; raffish party-haunting expats from Penang, Jakarta, Manila, stateless shards of a dead empire. Someone put LMFAO and turned up the bass.

He did some coke in the toilets to perk up from all the opiates. When he left the bathroom he walked into a tall man wearing a linen suit who was waiting, somewhat bizarrely, in the literal fucking doorway.

“Uh,” he said. “Is this some kind of, like, George Michael thing? I’m uh -- well I’m not really flattered, but I also don’t want to.”

“Oh!” said the tall man, looking down at him with an exaggerated, gormless expression of shock. He loathed having to look so far up into the faces of other men and he immediately loathed this man for it. “Oh, God -- oh, no, Mr. Roy, I’m not quite the, well, the cottaging type-- although I'm not averse to the French countryside! -- but well _I_ for one am flattered. You’re a very desirable bachelor. I hear,” the man leaned in, “this guy fucks, is what they say,” and he tapped him on his torn shoulder like a fucking dick, “this -- _guy_ \-- fucks.” His breath smelled like beer.

Kendall pulled back. “Okay,” he said. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Oh,” the man said. “I’m Tom. From Waystar. I’m on a business trip. Tom Wambsgans.” He suddenly did a little one-two punch. ”Wambs, gans, _thank you,_ ma’ams!” He misjudged his chumminess and hit Kendall’s torn shoulder in what seemed to be an attempt at bonding. He was clearly drunk. “Oh shit! I’m so sorry, Mr. Roy!”

“Excuse me,” Kendall said faintly, and went into the bathroom, and was sick again.


	2. Chapter 2

Only air came out. He could feel the clammy imprint of the tall weird guy’s punch; his shoulder whined and ached. He was repelled by the man’s chumminess, the presumption of similarity. There was something pathetic and naked in his eyes, something he didn’t like and didn’t recognise -- or perhaps didn’t want to recognise -- and so instead it became scorn. And then -- wiping his hands, pressing them into the dark circles under his eyes, a bump for good luck -- confirmed ROI on the party, he liked to think -- and then it occurred --

The weird guy was waiting for him. He pulled Tim into the bathroom.

“Mr.  _ Roy _ ?” he said. 

“Tom,” Tom said helpfully.

“What -- no --” Kendall felt suddenly cornered, unprepared to be Mr. Roy; there was some sort of complex neurochemical sparkle shorting synapses along whatever cerebellar pathways controlled his ocular muscles; his vision wavered and fizzed. He had all evening strived towards euphoria, albeit asymptotically; now he was knocked firmly off course. The jaws of the real world were snapping, and it felt personal. He realised that he didn’t know what day it was. The high was getting away from him. And there was the reflexive horror, too, of watching this man watch his face, his stuttering, and seeing himself. 

“Okay, uh, let’s back off here --” he fumbled for an insult, but he wasn’t quite there yet; he couldn’t quite catch his breath. The man helpfully backed off. 

Tom’s face approximated a smile. 

“Bro,” Kendall said. “How do you know. That I am Mr Roy.” 

“Oh,” Tom said, “There’s a bunch of us here, Waystar Roybros I mean, Mike told me about it. I’m just here on a trip for a few days. See, you know,” he leaned in to try and nudge Kendall again “the  _ sights and sounds and smells of Shanghai _ .”

Kendall had the impression that everywhere Tom touched him would leave moist patches. He felt like Tom would try and get into his nooks and crannies. He was losing control of the situation.

“Is that a problem?” he said, and Kendall said, “Look,  _ Tom _ , could you just  _ back off _ , how long have you been here?”

He was sweaty, and he had been fucked up for days, and the entire point of the whole party, orgy, whatever it was, that had been going for days -- the whole point was he was recovering, he’d been put on leave, he was kicking back, he was having  _ fun _ . But. They were here. Dad was here. To drink his whiskey and evaluate their mistresses and attempt to fuck each others’ mistresses, call him a spoiled daddy’s boy -- he knew what they said, he wasn’t stupid -- and he  _ loathed _ having to  _ look up _ into Tom’s broad, shiny, witless face, he spent so much time looking up into faces trying to appear not to be looking upward, balancing his eyes precariously in his face. He had read that no one respected short men. But the surgery was risky. 

“Oh, just, uh, a half an hour. Why? Is there a  _ problem _ ? Can I help?” He leaned in again, conspiratorially. There was something in him that begged to be confided in, and Kendall, who was pathologically uncomfortable with emotional exchange or overtures indicating such might take place, struggled to keep his sneer within a socially acceptable range of hostility.

But then again, there were uses for everyone. And if Dad knew he was spending his first month out in Shanghai getting fucked up with the local girls Pam, first names Diaze, Clonaze and Loraze, he was in deep shit; he was already aware that Dad had been keeping an eye on how much he drank at dinner, had been pointed at the size of Kendall’s whiskey pour. The saving grace was that Dad thought he was an alcoholic, which wasn’t exactly true; it was perhaps true that he had been perhaps a trifle generous with his Beajoulais Nouveau -- although it was _ of course, la saison, mais même étant donné qu’il passait du saison, il fallait qu’on s’amuse pas trop, eh?  _ as Dad’s cunt of a new girlfriend put it -- but it was equally true that he had snorted a bag in the bathroom before the dessert course, which he ate with the sweet cravings generated by opioid receptors blown open and brave and calm, and endured Dad’s slings and arrows quite contentedly, invisible and safe inside himself. 

He had more or less gotten away with it too -- he had it down to a fine art: he circulated, he didn’t speak too much, he spent a lot of time looking interested and nodding -- between nodding, of course -- and he drank a glass of water between each glass of wine, he drank an espresso for the road, he did uppers when he needed to perk up, he hit a vape or snorted another line for downers, he had it all under control -- but as he was slipping out to get his coat he heard Roman’s reedy voice echoing “I’ll go out with Kendall, thanks for, well... thanks,” shrugging, and Kendall thought, here we fucking go. He had never gotten the hang of predicting what Roman would ask of him; he thought Roman had grown into a weird and potentially unsavoury adult. Roman didn’t want the same things Kendall had learned to want, and it made Kendall uncomfortable in a way he couldn’t quite articulate. He didn’t know what Roman wanted. It made him unpredictable.

“Hey, dipshit,” Roman had said, shouldering into a Dior Homme wool peacoat. He was midway through some sort of bullshit NYU film MFA wank bullshit, where Kendall assumed he was for drugs and getting laid -- why else? -- and was going through a phase that involved a lot of black. “What’s hot?”

“What do you want,” Kendall said, but without heat; he’d finished the last of the bag, he felt good.

“Can we, you know,” Roman was staring at him keenly, his eyes narrowed, animated by a quick and penetrating curiosity; Kendall schooled his face into neutrality, but Roman had already seen whatever he was looking for, and knew that Kendall knew this too -- he could be creepy like that sometimes, he had these unexpected flashes of something devious and almost primitive in its intuition, he could see things about people that Kendall couldn’t. Kendall, who had felt in control of the situation until then, felt caught off guard.

“No,” he said, and went to call the elevator.

“Oh come on, don’t be such a skid rag -- look, here, hey,” Roman said, catching up to him, pulling his gloves on. “Come on, for old times’ sake you weird robot prick, let’s go out for a drink. I know there’s a bar where we can get paralytic a few blocks east. We could go, you know,” and here he mimed drinking a shot, then made a noose motion with one hand and jerked himself off with the other.

“I have work in the morning,” Kendall said, but he felt warm and the twinkly heroin glow was dampening his instinctive repulsion at the idea of enforced fraternal bonding. 

“Come on, I haven’t seen you in ages, we can catch up, all the hot goss. I fucked Paris Hilton. She was really mean.”

“You mean Paris Hilton fucked  _ you _ .”

“Only in the physical sense.”

“Fine. One drink.” 

In the bar they drank significantly more than one drink. Their security sat behind them. It was a deeply bad idea. He’d drank more than he realised. Within twenty minutes he was feeling warmer, drowsier, drenched in a dopamine glow like God’s sunlight shining inside him. Roman’s eyes were dark and impenetrable opposite him. The neon traced his face.

“So,” Roman said. “What’s going on with you?”

“Fuck you,” Kendall said automatically, but he was too fucked up to put much heat behind it. 

“No, for real,” Roman leaned in. He had been nursing half a beer for at least forty minutes by then, Kendall had watched him, feeling judged, and in the meantime put away significantly more vodka sodas himself. It wasn’t for the calories but it was. “You doing okay, buddy?” he said. His voice still didn’t quite sound sincere, but it was gentler than Kendall had heard it, and he felt humiliated that Roman thought he needed that. 

“ _ Oh, you doing okay, buddy?”  _ Kendall snarled at him. The adrenaline of his perceived weakness breaking through the fading remains of his heroin buzz, it surprised even him; by now he was mostly sloppy drunk, and he’d begun to lose awareness of how much drunker he was than Roman, and then the next thing he knew he was waking up on Roman’s couch in his apartment overlooking Central Park with his head pounding. It was five a.m. and he was sweating through his shirt and shivering in the early morning cool. There was a blanket next to him but it hadn’t been draped over him. He staggered to the kitchen and opened the fridge and found a beer and sucked it down. He couldn’t remember anything past snapping at Roman, which overall, he had to admit, did not bode well for the end of that particular conversation. He had a great feeling of doom hanging over him, and he was still half-drunk; he couldn’t bear the world now, dark and bile-flavoured and humiliating; he couldn’t bear sobering up slowly on that couch, tossing and turning, and feeling his brain jam and seize, the semi-presence of sleep almost worse, hypnagogically jerking in a frantic tarantella through the liminal predawn. He drank the rest of the beer, and then another, and then he left and went back to his apartment and showered and went into work and did a few lines off his desk and sailed through the day like the big-dick executive he was. And he ignored Roman’s calls. Except Dad had leaned in while he was presenting, and sniffed him, once, twice, and now --

\-- now he was here looking at his own baggy-eyed reflection in what was surely the world’s shiniest forehead, and he was more tired than he’d ever been before, and he wanted to be alone, he wanted fucking Waystar Royco out of his (their) fucking apartment. “Tom,” he said.

Tom saluted.

“Look, if you -- if you get rid of all these people you can stay, alright. Just get rid of them.”

Tom saluted once more. And then, half an hour later, or whatever time it was -- they were alone together.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> O California, don’t you know the sun is only a god  
> if you learn to starve for him?
> 
> Danez Smith: “I’m Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense”

He came to slowly, then all at once with a great choking surge of panic -- the same way he’d been ‘waking up’ for the last however-many-days-it-had-been. More of a temporary reprieve. He jerked like a strange fish barbed through its mouth, reeled in unwillingly from the depths by some unknown set of hands. The world around him resolved itself: an unfamiliar bed, sterile surroundings that could have been anywhere, anything, but when he jerked his left arm something tore with a sickening twist  _ inside _ of it and came out with a welling bubble of red venal blood. He stared at it, uncomprehending, and then: he was in the fucking hospital.

_ Fuck _ , he tried to say, but nothing came out. The ripped IV dangled flaccid beside his arm, which had a trail of blood leaking down it, the only bright thing in the room aside from the plastic orchid on the bare bedside locker. He appeared by the smell to have drooled bile all over himself, but when he looked down his hospital gown was white, freshly laundered or new as was his expectation. Maybe he just smelled like bile now. Maybe that was how his blood smelled. Maybe the hole in his arm was leaking the rot out. 

The room around him had the slight pulsing aura of top-notch painkillers. He immediately regretted pulling out the line; the panic vibrated in his diaphragm, contained for who knew how long, until it broke through, surfacing in the lovely chemical sea to gobble him up whole? All the while his bright diseased blood went drip drip drip on the floor as from the mouth of a speared, flopping fish. 

He had a choice, he thought hazily, the part of him that wasn’t consumed with fear, waiting; he had pulled the line out, there was nothing physically keeping him there. He could leave. He had money. Out on the dirty street he’d be just another drunk white expat, come to Shanghai do whatever people did. Nobody would know who he was. Nothing about him had ever really stood out, despite endless hours of executive coaching, years in front of the mirror, private school grooming and elocution classes and debate club that had sanded off his weird stutter and puffed up his chest, taught him land it on-stage -- take three steps to the side while setting up talking point, turn, pause, deliver talking point, pause again, own the space -- but when he wasn’t turning it on, nobody saw him. He knew, in his rawest heart, that he didn’t and couldn’t effortlessly command attention. He had to fight for it. He tried to be proud of it -- they all thought he was spoiled but he fought for what he got. Unlike Roman who despite being a weird little fuck seemed somehow, against the odds, to find an audience wherever he went; or Shiv, who pouted and wheedled and never actually tried that hard and yet always managed to make things shake out as planned. 

If he had nothing else, he had tenacity. But now he was tired and he thought -- maybe being as unremarkable as he truly was, deep down, it could be a strength. He could give up, he thought. Slip out the door. Empty his bank account and buy a fifth and disappear. 

But what  _ did _ people do?

His room was in what he presumed was a private ward, high up. The sun beat down, bouncing in a shining arc between the mirrored towers, back and forth in an infinite endless glittering parabola, blinding him with light. He desperately wanted a cigarette. Down beneath him were people, streets. He was up here. There were so many ways down. If he could only find them.

Someone was politely clearing their throat. He was guided gently and firmly back to bed, his IV reinserted. He felt the cool flow of whatever it was inside him. His body was manipulated beneath the sheets. A dull sense of separation flooded through him and he felt if not quite good then detached which was close enough. The doctor was Chinese and spoke the Queen’s English and told him he’d had not one but in fact several seizures in a professional tone. He was lucky that his friend had been there, the doctor told him, or he might have died, but his friend got him to hospital -- and nobody had seen him, the doctor assured him. Mr. Roy. Don’t you worry about that.

_ Shit, _ Kendall thought, and then with the confidence of the freshly-narcotised thought, well, a seizure is plausible. Tim hadn’t seen anything incriminating. That he remembered. Bad reaction. He could make it all go away. And Tim had been so desperate. 

“It must have been a bad reaction to the drugs for my shoulder,” Kendall said.

“Quite,” the doctor said. “The thing, ah, the thing, Mr. Roy, is that we also did a tox screen and found, ah. A significant amount of substances. Prescription and ah. Otherwise.”

“I -- okay,” Kendall said. This was the point where he would and slash or should have been belligerent. But he was suddenly so tired. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept -- really slept, and not just swan-dived out of consciousness. “Okay,” he tried again, but nothing else was coming. He tried to spread his hands as though to say,  _ who, me? _ and even though the fresh infusion he felt his torn shoulder scream. 

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” the doctor said wryly. “You landed on your shoulder. When you had the first seizure. It had to be re-set.”

This was, theoretically, bad, but also a reason for a script, so go figure. Kendall tried to gauge how the doctor expected him to react and rearranged his face accordingly. He didn’t quite get there, based on the doctor’s reaction. 

“Okay. When can I leave?” Kendall said, when the doctor made no attempt to continue the conversation, and judging by the doctor’s face he had continued his inability to react as expected. He ignored Kendall’s question but continued to study him, which was somehow the one thing that cut through the drugs, rousing his temper, and so Kendall clicked his fingers aggressively in the doctor’s face, or as close as he could get without moving from his prone position in the bed, which admittedly not at all close and snapped, “Hey, I’m fucking talking to you, you work for me, dickhead. When can I leave?”

The doctor blinked but didn’t seem particularly phased. He seemed to be considering sitting on the bed, but reconsidered. “Mr Roy,” he said. “I don’t think you quite realise the, ah, gravity of the situation.”

Kendall was silent. His fingers searched surreptitiously for the pump, to see if he could force more of whatever it was into his bloodstream. The doctor saw. He raised an eyebrow, and his face reconfigured into an emotion Kendall couldn’t quite place. He could have fucking throttled him. “Okay,” he said.

“I’m compelled to ask you, Mr Roy. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way. Was this deliberate?”

“Uh,” Kendall said, and not knowing what to do, he scoffed. The doctor kept his gaze steady. The silence filled the still white room, punctuated by beeps and whirrs. “Fuck you, man,” he said, when he couldn’t take the silence any more. He looked at the white sheets that could have been in a thousand hotel rooms, a thousand different versions of himself. 

When he looked up, the doctor was still looking at him, and he realised with a sudden disgusted shock that he was crying, silently and without realising he’d begun. A fat tear rolled down his cheek. All he could think, suddenly, was that it wasn’t  _ fair _ , that his shitty fucking siblings didn’t need to do any of this, that nobody he knew had to do any of this, that they all somehow just got what they fucking wanted while he scraped and bowed and fought and bullied and for what? To cry like a little bitch, to have a doctor pat his little whining baby head and about his fucking  _ feelings _ . He couldn’t take the humiliation; he couldn’t bear it any more. “Get the fuck out of my room,” he said, when he could speak again, but he couldn’t look at the doctor, and still the tears kept coming. He had always cried easily. It was as humiliating as an adult man as it had been as a teenager. 

“Wait,” he said, as the doctor began to leave. “Wait. I --  _ stop  _ \--”

The doctor looked at him with that strange expression on his face again. “Yes, Mr Roy?” he said.

“I --” Kendall said, and a fresh wave of -- whatever it was -- overcame him and he had to choke the words out through a raw and closing throat, his nose snotty like a child’s -- “Look, man, can you just -- is there something you can like. Uh, give me. That would make it, you know.”

When he didn’t finish, the doctor’s voice was gentle. “Make it…?”

“You know,” Kendall said, his rage giving away to desperate humiliation. “Stop. Make it stop. I just … I want it to go away.”

He couldn’t look up. The silence resumed, except for the hitching sound of his breath; he was properly crying, and finally, the doctor, with a soft voice worse than any slap he’d ever received, said, “We can help you, Mr Roy, but I can’t just give you drugs. But we can help, we can send you home--” and Kendall, infuriated by the wet snot and mucus and drugs heard only  _ Mr Roy _ and when the doctor tried, gently, softly, “Kendall,” he reached for the decorative plastic orchid in the cheap white vase on the bedside locker and whipped it at the doctor as hard as he could. It shattered against the wall. There was no liquid inside the vase. The plastic plant was unharmed. It was the only colour in the room. The blood on his arm had dried to a dark crusty brown, the colour of dirt.

Once more, the hitching sound of his breath after the shocking smash of ceramic on plaster; he was fully sobbing now. “I’ll leave you to make a decision,” the doctor said gracefully, and withdrew.

Alone he was like a faulty faucet. He didn’t feel that sad; without someone to direct his rage at, he didn’t feel much of anything at all. He found his phone and paged for a charger and plugged it in and immediately deleted all messages, all the while leaking tears and snot onto the bed. He ran his fingers over his eyebrow and realised it was stitched, crusted in more blood that rained in dirty flakes on the whiteness of the bed. The bright pink plastic orchid lay on the floor. It looked like genitalia from a certain angle. 

He went to take a piss, finally, and saw in the mirror that he had the beginnings of a black eye beneath the paper stitches; he had apparently taken a corner when he’d hit the decks, and all the blood vessels in his eye had burst, leaving the sclera a shocking red. The other eye was bloodshot. He learned his forehead on the mirror. He felt he was always resting his pounding head against a flat coolness that kept him in place. He desperately wanted a cigarette. The tears simply would not stop. 

When he was a child, his tendency towards tears had embarrassed both his parents, who regarded open displays of emotion as they would shitting oneself in public. Shiv had learned to strategically deploy the tears permitted to girls; Roman’s latent defiant streak enabled him to take any amount of abuse and perversely ask for more; and meanwhile, who the fuck knew what planet Connor was on. Kendall, on the other hand, had been a tearful child prone to temper tantrums: he wanted attention, love, achievement,  _ more _ , with a naked rawness that embarrassed everyone around him, a wanting that exceeded both his will and talent, exceeded even his own ability to master it. He simply needed to learn to control himself, Logan said. He made it sound so simple.

And yet. There was some part of him that was foreign to himself and yet stronger than his known self. That scared him. That little part that stole and lied and snorted and screamed and that couldn’t be excised. He stared at his bloody red eyes in the mirror. There was a theory he’d read once, in some business psychology book: that we are strangers to ourselves by design, our depths unknowable as the ocean floor, filled with monstrous creatures bristling with teeth, trawling for easy prey. That we have no true way of reconciling ourselves to ourselves. His face was swollen with edema; white and purple like a bruised ghost, his heart raw and tachycardic.

He suddenly realised what the look on the doctor’s face had been. He rested his fist against the mirror. As if to smash it.


	4. Chapter 4

When Shiv was a little girl, she adored her older brother until she learned to hate him. Kendall was in high school while she was stuck with babies, children she couldn’t stand even when she herself was a child. He was a semi-mysterious and benevolent figure, hefting a lacrosse bag, bringing her treats from the bodega he’d sneak out to, throwing her in the air or letting her stand on his toes as he bounced her around the room. She vied for his attention alternately shyly and aggressively; she’d always been a Daddy’s girl, and later a man’s woman, which she’d seen as a strength until she realised there’d been no other alternative -- but Kendall she simply couldn’t get enough of; he was older and taller and comfortingly familiar yet exotically male, but unlike Daddy, he never scared her. 

She’d felt safe with him. Crying in the house wasn’t allowed, at least real crying; when she was sad or lonely or scared, she’d learned to smile through it. Aggression, equally unpermitted: at least not from her, not from pretty little Pinkie. And she’d quickly learned -- more quickly than Kendall, even, who never seemed to quite understand where the lines lay, who pushed his luck constantly in a way that grew to infuriate her as an adult, but whose aggression was at least _allowed_ \-- she’d learned when to back off, when to smile and bat her eyelashes and appease Daddy. She was never at risk of being hit, not like the boys. But she was never at risk of anything. To be at risk, you had to at least matter.

When she was little, of course, she couldn’t articulate any of it -- but sometimes she would come to Kendall’s room watery-eyed, knocking softly. When her school results were bad and she was scared to tell Daddy. When she was in trouble again for fighting with the other girls, calling them _bitches_ and _sluts_ , words she didn’t understand but knew the power of, when she’d slap them and thought she could get away with it. He’d let her in, groggily, and let her sit on the bed, though they barely talked; he was an inarticulate, slouchy teenager. But even then, she knew: to play it up, even if it was real. The pouting, the trembling. She had big blue eyes perfect for welling with tears, and the sadder she looked the more she got what she wanted. But it was still real, and she was overwhelmed sometimes by it all. Kendall, silent next to her, didn’t expect anything of her, made her feelings feel less big for what a cute little girl she was. But way his face softened when she cried also made her feel powerful, too: her big older brother, Daddy’s favourite, doing what she wanted. It wasn’t quite what she wanted, but it was as close as she’d get. 

Later she would learn to attack and cover strategically, and she promised herself she’d never cower again, but as a child her aggression came out suddenly like projectile vomit, spouts of rage she couldn’t control, and she would kick and shout until she went hoarse and then only Kendall could calm her down. She only wanted her big brother, who said nothing to her, but let her scream herself out. She’d loved him more than anyone else. She’d thought maybe she was his favourite too, uncontingently, maybe even unconditionally.

She was fifteen when she realised that she’d grown up, that she was a pretty girl, and the realisation, weirdly enough, came from Kendall. At that point they were all old enough to have become more or less themselves, and Roman would try and gross her out, talk about periods, tits, anything to get a response. Something she never gave a shit about, really: she’d been the only girl everywhere she went, her whole life, her mother didn’t even like her very much, she got the message loud and clear. And so: since she’d grown boobs, Roman had thrown it in her face, being the girl, but in a way that felt almost jealous, like: an excuse for bowing out of the race. Even if she had actually maybe wanted to compete. Even if maybe she was jealous of _him_ , for getting to go to military school, to have some authority to fight against instead of just getting a pat on the head like she did.

But Kendall was almost Victorianly squeamish; he made involuntarily revolted faces when Roman joked about dicks and balls and tits. He went flat and withdrawn when asked about his girlfriends; he was wildly private about his personal grooming. Not that she’d paid much attention to it -- she had enough to deal with herself -- but she was good at people and she saw the difference, with Roman happy to slap and kick and wrestle her, usually annoying but sometimes just fun to get the energy out, and Kendall meanwhile looking disgusted and uncomfortable but she saw how yellow his fingers had gotten with nicotine stains, which: gross. But then: he was also cuddly where Roman was skittish at any touch that wasn’t somehow violent, and she still loved hugging him at Christmas, even though he smelled like cigarettes now, all the time: he reminded her of how she’d felt as a little girl, when he’d seemed so big and so safe.

But: you can’t escape becoming who you are. And one day she’d been at home, and there was some horny Christina Aguilera video on the TV, and Kendall had come by in one of the dorky Cucinelli suits he’d favoured, and stood there, hovering in the door, silently.

“Hi, Kendall,” she said, pointedly.

“Hi,” he said. “What the fuck is that on the TV?”

“Popular music. You know, the stuff people listen to. When they have lives.”

“Ha ha ha Siobhan.” he said. “I have good taste in music, actually, not this shit. No. I’m being serious.”

“Okay, serious,” she said. “When are you not? It’s just a fucking music video, Ken, relax.”

“Okay,” he said, and seemed to hesitate, and then said, “It’s just …“ and paused again, and it was like the old times in a way except: what was he going to lecture her about that she could already lap him in? Like she didn’t know shit about how horny men could be? Like she was a baby?

“Yes?” she said acidly.

“Never mind,” Kendall said, and turned and went into the kitchen and put down his briefcase and walked back out. “No, actually. Shiv I just -- you don’t need to act like that,” he said, gesturing at the video. He seemed to straighten up, put on another set of shoulders, and his voice was flatter and deeper and he said, “It’s not how a Roy should act, uh, you should know that by now, Siobhan, you shouldn’t be watching this trash. You’re a pretty girl. You need to act appropriately.” 

“What the fuck,” Shiv said, because she didn’t know what to say, and -- who the fuck was she even talking to now, what was this? It was disorienting, she hadn’t expected this, not from him, and so floundering, she spat: “Thanks for the fucking tip, I’ll be sure to keep it in mind if I want to wear assless chaps.”

“You have a reputation to uphold,” Kendall said, persistent. “You’re a Roy.” 

“What the fuck,” Shiv said again, and when she looked over he was already going over to the wet bar, where Daddy kept the good whiskey for the guests, and what the fuck was this? As he walked away, she shouted, “Don’t fucking _do that_ , Kendall.” She was suddenly incensed, but by her own confusion; she felt ambushed, she hadn’t expected it of him, and she’d already given away her position by revealing it. And still he walked away from her direct command, like she was a silly little girl, and she’d thought maybe he was the person who knew that she wasn’t, who knew what she was, but she was wrong. She would only ever be the girl. The pretty girl. 

And she knew, then, that she was on her own. She’d lost her last support. Kendall had become Kendall Roy. 

But if Kendall was now Kendall Roy, who was Shiv Roy?

+

By the time she was in college, she knew that she wasn’t just pretty: she was beautiful, and it was powerful, to be desired. She was determined, then, that she would be Shiv Roy. And Shiv Roy did not get thrown for a fucking loop, Shiv Roy knew you couldn’t trust anyone, Shiv Roy did not get told what to do what to do. Finding out who Shiv Roy was -- creating Shiv Roy -- was a challenge, and Shiv Roy loved a challenge. 

Home for Christmas, she truanted in silent rebellion, she went to dive bars, she fucked strange men in toilets. She never came, but the thrill was like nothing she’d ever experienced; the way the men looked at her, the way she could make them look at her, dumb slavering animals. She had learned that the kind of pretty she was led men to think she was fragile, delicate, dumb, and so she delighted herself by winning every game of brinksmanship, and delighted herself because they thought it was about them -- men always thought everything was about them -- but the game was only ever internal. She was solid gold with a heart of fire; she was too hot for them to touch for long, they couldn’t hold on. They didn’t know who they were messing with. In the liminal space of the countless identical bars, in the liminal space of male faces, she was in control. 

She never got sloppy. It was never about that. She would put back on her Siobhan costume when she came in through the doors of the penthouse. Coming in at 3am, one time, perfectly groomed and perfumed, she passed Kendall on the couch. Which was not unexpected; he’d always had a habit of running himself ragged until he’d suddenly pass out, sometimes in unexpected places, once even at the dinner table where he faceplanted into the mashed potatoes. She came closer, curious, and realised that there was a bottle of Daddy’s whiskey empty on the floor next to him, one of the _really_ nice ones that he would definitely get his ass kicked over. She considered putting it away. He stank of booze, of cigarettes. She went to bed instead. During Christmas dinner the next day, Kendall’s face was livid and bruised, and he pushed his food around the plate until Daddy made him eat it all. Shiv had gotten up early to shower and do her makeup and she glowed as Daddy praised her for how pretty she looked, what a credit she was to their name, and Kendall shot her a poisonous look but mostly didn’t look at anyone at all. Later she heard him throwing it up as she fixed her hair.

But she’d already decided that she wasn’t going to be a credit to anyone’s name but her own, and she was doing Communications and Political Science, (“professional manipulation, what a surprise” Roman had sneered, with his delusions of artist integrity, whatever the fuck that was). She had finally found something she was, well, actually good at -- well, fucking great at, actually. She had a head for talking points, for narrative, and she could orchestrate, and more than anything she had a head for control. She loved when the interview started to go off the rails and she could step in and stop it, when she could say _no more questions_ , or _we don’t comment on that_ , or _that wasn’t what we discussed._ She loved to see how the story was built, and she had a head for it too. She was noticed in her class. Her professor took her aside, told her she was remarkable, invited her to office hours. She killed all her papers. She was crushing it. She left a trail of broken hearts wherever she went. 

But more than that she finally had finally grasped the outline of who Shiv Roy could be. So it was a surprise when her professor closed the door, and put his hand on her thigh, and told her that she was even more than brilliant -- more importantly than that, she was gorgeous. And he tried to kiss her, and she was pressed into the wall, she was frozen in place, there was a tongue in her mouth, and she _could not move_ , she was overwhelmed, and the hand palmed her breast and suddenly her brain started to process in hyper-time, everything went bright and sharp, and she brought her knee up into his balls. He tore back from her, and slapped her and called her a bitch -- but she saw her chance and she ran from the room, panting and shaking, all the way to her dorm, her face bright red.

In her room, she paced, unable even to cry, unable to think. She wasn’t a victim, she was Shiv Roy, this didn’t happen to people like her. Her face was swollen and puffy and tender. She paced over and over, snarling at the windows, she found an illicit bottle of vodka, swallowed the raw burn, buried it deep in her breast. She took a shower, the vodka bottle in with her for the first time, she didn’t know what to do. She began to perceive, dimly, the bars of the cage of her own beauty. This was not a challenge she could face, or overcome. This was something that had been done to her. She simply couldn’t countenance it, what had been made to happen to her. And still she could not cry. And the humiliation: maybe she truly didn't know shit about how horny men could be. Maybe this was all she'd ever be worth. But there had been one person, long ago, who'd let her be someone else.

Kendall was in Shanghai, and not knowing what else to do, she took Daddy’s platinum and booked a flight.


	5. Chapter 5

She got the corporate housing address from Kendall’s assistant -- there was no way he’d have gotten his own place -- and called the driver. Frenzied, pacing, feeling something tearing and clawing at her from the inside out, she looked up the weather and chose her best outfits. She undressed and looked at her body in the mirror. She evaluated herself, peering through the rectangular shining window. She reframed in her head, the way she’d learned, the way she’d always been so naturally talented at doing: so gorgeous, so irresistible; she turned and examined her ass. The vodka had begun to work, it had calmed her racing heart. She had never needed alcohol to calm down. She dug her perfect oval nails into her ass and slapped it, hard. Her palm print was red, overlaid across the hemispherical half-moon imprints like the claw-marks of some well-civilized beast. Then she got dressed again in a sexy little head-turner and did her makeup with extra care to her swollen cheek and curled her hair. 

_You are Shiv Roy,_ she said, but the beautiful woman in the mirror didn’t look convinced. She had tears welling in her eyes. She only looked better for it.

There was a bar in the car she ignored. She folded her fingers to avoid picking her cuticles. She looked through the opaque woman semi-reflected in the windows at the city around her, grey buildings looming, grey skies descending. The vodka had begun to take effect and she dozed, slightly; she dreamed of dark rooms, at night. A silent man -- a boy, really, trying his hardest -- who held her hand and didn’t ask for anything. It seemed so far away. She was delivered, a perfumed package, from car to plane to car, and then, some non-existent stretch of time later, she was watching, through the same opaque face a different set of buildings through a different set of car windows. 

She got a brief glimpse of the foreign street as she left the car and her security guided her to the corp building: unfamiliar smells, sounds, languages she didn’t understand -- she didn’t like it, she felt overwhelmed, she realised how close she could come to being lost. She wanted to take the arm of her security guy but he might get the wrong idea. In the lobby, she showed her ID and was waved through and led to a bright and clean box playing some sort of vaguely Orientalish muzak to the penthouse. The man pressed the button for her. The doors closed and she ascended. She was suddenly very tired and very nervous. She had no idea what time it was, or what she wanted, or what she’d see. She braced herself. Kendall hated surprises, and would undoubtedly throw a fit, and she’d have to force her way through -- feeling panicked, suddenly, realising she’d have to _explain herself_ \-- and maybe this was a really bad idea, maybe she didn’t know what she was doing, she wanted to turn around but the elevator bore her inexorably upward, another room she couldn’t escape --

When the doors pinged she took a deep breath. They opened. She thought for a moment she had the wrong apartment; Kendall was usually kind of a slob unless he was going through one of his manic phases where everything had to be perfect. But this place was sparkling clean -- was empty. You couldn’t tell that Kendall was living there; you couldn’t tell that anyone was living there. She clicked cautiously in, feeling her way -- and suddenly a strange male voice called “Hello?” and she froze. She hadn’t been prepared for this. She smiled reflexively, seductively, but it was too hard; she was so tired; she thought, frantically, perhaps she couldn’t do it after all. The strange man came out from another room, and a part of her that was always functioning sized him up: tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed, he was handsome, actually, in an ordinary way. He was wearing a suit that wasn’t quite properly cut; the break was too long, and the shoes were expensive but over-shined. He smiled at her, and she stepped back, unsure of what to say. His smile hovered, and went through a series of movements that she realised was concern. Her smile, or whatever it had become, froze on her face.

“Where’s Kendall?” she said, and her voice came out more shrill than she’d expected. The man put his arms out, gently. She took another step back.

“Hey, are you okay?” the man said.

“Who the fuck are you?” Shiv said.

“Oh!” the man said, and he literally jumped, and there was something almost cartoonishly unthreatening about him in a way that was incredibly disorienting. “I’m so sorry. My name is Tom. Tom Wambsgans. I’m a top exec at Waystar Royco.”

The obvious fact that he was no one at all helped Shiv relax, but still: she was frozen in place, she hadn’t been prepared. She wasn’t fit for the challenge. And she was so tired. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know what time it was. She didn’t know the man in front of her. She didn’t know where Kendall was. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do.

 _“_ You must be Siobhan. _Enchanté,”_ Tom said, when the silence continued, but he still didn’t approach her -- just stayed there with his arms outstretched -- and it was so pompous, so ridiculous, that she laughed, and he laughed along with her, looking relieved, but her laugh kept going until it turned into something weird and keening, and his face turned again to that foreign expression of concern, and she realized then that she’d begun to cry. She had a sudden memory of hearing Daddy talking to their mother, accusing her of coddling Kendall, asking how his heir could possibly be such a wimpy little drip, and a wave of shame overcame her. She didn’t have much to fight with against Kendall but she could control herself -- but here she was, crying in front of this strange man, and she laughed, that she was as weak as Kendall was after all. The laugh came out, amidst the tears, and she was laughing and crying, standing there in her beautiful red coat with her own nail imprints in her ass, her makeup rapidly becoming a mess.

“Are you --” Tom said hesitantly. “Can I get you a cup of tea?” and he still didn’t try to come near her. She was surprised. Nobody offered her things. She told them what to do. Otherwise she wouldn’t get anything. And besides, who drank tea? They drank coffee, or wine. 

“Yeah,” she said, smiling through her tears. “Yeah, that would be nice.”

She sat at the table, keeping her coat on, and Tom busied himself, chattering away to her -- what kind of tea do you like, how was your flight, do you take milk, oh wait never mind we don’t have any, sorry, I flew first class here too (proudly), the SKO is being held here, that’s why I’m here, I’ve been working really closely with Kendall, he’s probably mentioned me (he hadn’t). The presumption that she and Kendall talked to each other was, again, weirdly charming in its naivete. He knew so little. She began to relax.

She connected her phone to the wifi and it vibrated on the table immediately. She scrolled and there was one from Roman, which caught her eye: he rarely texted her.

_Dad going batshit. Kendall MIA. WTF????_

_Fuck_ , she thought, and then with a flare of anger: _Kendall, why can’t you ever just do your fucking job and be normal?_

She had come here looking for comfort, or something approaching it. But now the anger felt good, invigorating. Except: why was everything always about him?

 _im in shanghai_ she replied, with no idea what the timezone was. Her phone immediately started to buzz like a chattering insect with an incoming call from Roman. She silenced the call and let it ring out.

“Tom,” she said, calling to him in the kitchen. 

He came to heel, presenting her a cup with a dorky flourish. The tea was badly made, but it was warm. She drank it and realised she was grateful, anyway: a rare feeling. Casually, she asked: “Where’s Kendall?”

“Oh,” Tom said. “Hasn’t he called you?”

“Yeah,” she lied, wiping her eyes, smoothing back her hair, putting herself back together. “But we had trouble with the connection, he couldn’t get through.”

“Weird,” Tom said. “I would have thought the hospital would have gotten through.”

“ _Hospital?”_ she said, losing her sangfroid. She dug her nails into her palm. She needed to get it together.

“Did …” he shifted in his seat, “Did you not know that?”

“I --” she said, but she had no way out. “No, I didn’t know that.”

“Oh,” Tom said, and his face shifted into more concern, and he reached out his hand as if to hold hers, wrapped around the mug, but didn’t touch it. “Well, you know -- he’s always been prone to seizures, he told me --”

“ _What?”_ she said. Her phone started to buzz again and she dropped it in her bag. Tom continued blithely on, “Yeah, and of course he was already on medical leave for his shoulder, and then --” he leaned in conspiratorially -- “between you and me, that speech he made when he arrived, it went down well with the rank and files, and but I hear some of the head brass were,” voice up and down now, jolly, as if this wasn’t her fucking dipshit brother, “pre-eeetty upset by what he announced, they said it was far too ambitious, and it caused some ruffled feathers with Beijing.” 

He sounded so pleased to be in the know. It was almost endearing, if what he was saying wasn’t such a fucking trainwreck. _Kendall_ , she thought again, _why can’t you ever just be normal, why can’t you just be who you’re supposed to be? Even just for your own sake?_ She didn’t want to be in this position. She had her own shit to deal with. She had left, or tried to, so that she wouldn’t have to deal with this. But here she was again.

“Tom,” she said. “The seizures. Tell me about that.”

“Well,” he said, and he shifted back to his serious, consoling face, and she thought then that she might touch her hand as a prop for his performance but he still didn’t, although she knew he wanted to. “He told me he’d injured his shoulder, and that he was also on some other medication, and that it had interacted badly, and that he’d had seizures before. But after I got everyone out from the party--”

“ _From the party?”_ she said. Her brain whirred. She couldn't seem to stop losing her cool. She never went to Kendall’s parties, she couldn’t stand his slimy friends, especially that arrogant douchey Arab guy he loved so much and followed around like a puppy -- but she’d heard plenty about them. What a fucking PR nightmare. She wanted to rub her temples, but she had to be normal in front of Tom.

And it was so like him, she thought, to not tell anyone actually important what was going on, anyone who might actually _care_ \-- he was so good at finding himself surrounded by these kinds of people, who bought his bullshit. Like Tom, who now looked comically guilty. 

“What party,” she said, and her voice made Tom jump, he looked like a little cartoon puppy caught taking a shit on the rug. She had to take it down a notch, but she found she couldn’t. “What fucking party Tom--”

“Well okay it was kind of a rager and -- he told me not to say anything--”

“I’m his fucking sister, Tom. Tell me. _Tell me_.”

Tom shifted in his seat, and then said, “Okay, well, it was a pretty standard rager actually. The usual kind, you know, top brass, like us, letting off some steam. He told me he wasn’t feeling well, and asked me to get everyone out, and then when I did, he said he still wasn’t feeling well, and he tried to make me leave too -- but I thought it was a good idea if I stayed, and then he suddenly, well, he…” Tom trailed off. He seemed to suddenly realize that he was breaking the news to her.

“He?” Shiv pressed.

“It was pretty bad, Siobhan. He had a seizure and hit his head on the table when he fell." He paused and said, then, brightly: "The, ah, the cleaning staff did a great job getting all the blood out of the carpet, though! I called the concierge to get him to the hospital, but he had another seizure when they arrived. He called from the hospital and said that he hadn’t hurt himself badly, though. He said he was used to it and that it was a medical condition from when he was a child, and that it happened sometimes and must have been because of the meds for his shoulder. He said not to bother any of you because you were used to it.”

Shiv’s vision swam. She drank the tea for lack of what to do. 

“Yeah,” she said, finally. “Yeah, I guess, it’s true. I guess he’s always been like that. Thanks for the... thanks for the update Tom.” She found herself fluidly, numbly, moving into position, running with the narrative. “I guess you just scared me because it sounded so bad at the start. Would you mind excusing me for a second?”

In the bathroom she found she was too shocked for tears. She texted Roman: _Hes in hospital i dont know anything else dont tell dad. Hes alive Ill update u later. Cant talk now sry some rando here._ Roman immediately tried to call her again and she turned off her phone. A mean little voice in her head, co-existent with the concern: at least I’m not the biggest fuckup. She felt guilty immediately. But it was true. And in the back of her head, the anger, too: I wouldn't throw away his chances.

She looked at herself in the mirror and smoothed down her hair and came out and Tom was still there. She tried to think: damage control. Handle it. Her head span.

“Well, you know Kendall,” she said, confidingly. “Always biting off more than he can chew.”

“Classic Kendall!” he said. Flattered. “He gets himself into these scrapes sometimes, he said. A few days of R&R and he’ll be right as rain!”

“Right,” she said. “Exactly! Ha ha ha. He’ll never change.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol im on a roll playing with my barbies


	6. Chapter 6

Apparently Kendall would be discharged later that day. Shiv tried calling him first from her own phone, and then from Tom’s, but he wouldn’t pick up. Roman was still blowing her up, but she didn’t have the energy, and besides: fuck Kendall, anyway, if he couldn’t step up and handle it himself, why should she do it for him? It was easier to be angry with him anyway, she wanted to be angry at him: he was the older, the heir, he was supposed to be the best of them, so why should she have to prop him up?

But in the meantime there was nothing to do, and she didn’t want to have to think, so she poured herself a scotch and decided she was going to fuck Tom. 

He was handsome enough, she thought, looking at him as he tapped on his phone; he was tall, and he had broad shoulders, and she knew she could make him beg for it. For the privilege. 

“Tom, do you want some of this scotch?” she asked. 

“Oh! Why yes, ma’am,” he said, doing a voice that was apparently intended to be some kind of 1940s Raymond Chandler deal but came out more Foghorn Leghorn. Again, she found herself inexplicably charmed by it: he was so different to all the men she knew, there was something so silly about him. He wasn’t a threat. She poured him a drink and made sure to touch his hand when she handed him the glass, her fingers lingered on his. She saw him stiffen slightly and try not to react; she knew she was in.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said, though she didn’t really care. But people were very simple: all you needed was to pretend to be interested, to treat them like they were important, and you could do whatever you wanted. They were begging to be known. She could think of nothing worse.

Tom bragged about his mom, who was a top attorney in the Twin Cities; his MBA (some mid-tier school she’d never heard of; it was cute that he didn’t realise it wasn’t worth shit if it wasn’t from the Ivies); his “extremely fast path” up the ladder at Waystar Royco. He was trying to impress her, the way men always did, and she sipped her whiskey, and realised that Tom had asked her a question only when he stopped and waited.

“Pardon?” she said.

“I said, enough about me! I want to know more about the enchanting Siobhan,” and he winked, and she thought, oh, you’ll do anything for me when you’re beneath me, won’t you.

But also: this didn’t happen, the men never asked about her, they only wanted. She was caught off guard. 

“Oh, I’m just finishing up my degree, it’s not very interesting,” she said, and then to avoid the inevitable question -- what will you do at Waystar -- she took his hand from the glass, and took his index finger, which was actually, surprisingly, beautifully and elegantly shaped, and she put it in her mouth and sucked. 

Tom’s face went from shocked to horny double-quick, and he started to say something, and Shiv went _shhhhhh_ and leaned over and put her hand on his mouth, and he did as he was told. She got up and sat on his lap and kissed his neck. She could feel his erection and she ground against it and usually that was the money-move right there but Tom leaned back and took her face in his hands so she was looking at him, and said, “Are you sure you want to do this? You seemed so upset.”

“Shut up,” she said, and she found almost to her own surprise that she was actually horny; she rocked against his erection again and saw the lust in his face, and she felt powerful.

“Siobhan. I’m serious,” Tom said, even though she could feel him straining towards her, she could feel how much his body wanted hers.

“Shiv,” she said. “Call me Shiv.”

“Shiv.”

“Yes, okay? Yes I obviously fucking want this.”

And then Tom was kissing her, clumsily but with a real heat, and his mouth was hot and wet, and she ground herself against his body, so big and broad, and he picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. There were condoms on the table; she tried not to think about their provenance. She realised that this was probably Kendall's bed, and she felt a perverse twist of disgust, but also power -- he couldn't tell her what to do, nobody could, she did whatever she wanted. Tom undressed her gently, he was too gentle, he was moving too slowly. She could smell the sweat of her own body and it felt real, grounding. She tore his shirt off and pushed him onto Kendall's bed and climbed on top of him and rolled the condom on and guided his cock into her. She slid on it, slowly, feeling herself opening up, Tom watching her face intently. She sat back when he was inside her, feeling the fullness of his cock, and allowed herself to be admired. She guided Tom’s hands to hold her breasts. His thumbs stroked her nipples.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said. She wanted to roll her eyes. She didn’t like it when they talked. The whole point: you didn’t have to. 

“Fuck me, Tom,” she said instead, breathily, and the lust in his eyes was _so_ satisfying; he wanted her so badly, she was his entire world. She rocked back and forth, and settled into a rhythm, and held Tom’s hands on her breasts and moved them up and down along her hips and then finally pinned them to the bed, and Tom made a sort of strangled noise at that, and so she leaned forward and pulled his wrists over his head and held them there with one hand and put her other hand on his throat. Her hand wasn’t big enough to cover the span of his neck. She squeezed and felt Tom press deeper into her and come.

She released his arms and throat. “You’re incredible,” Tom said, when he caught his breath, and she smirked, and climbed off him. He tied off the condom and she was about to get out of bed when he took her hand and said, “Hold on, what about you?”

“What about me?” Shiv said.

“Shiv, I have a declaration to make: I’m not letting you get out of this bed until I’ve made you come at least once. Ideally more,” he said, solemnly, and she found herself actually giggling, and then she was lying on her back with Tom holding her hips, and he was actually, unexpectedly, good at eating pussy. She spread her legs wider, and the novelty was almost as much as the horniness: the men she usually did this with, they came and then they came and they left. She finished herself off, when she could be bothered. But Tom had his tongue inside of her, not caring that he’d just come there -- another surprise, most men were so squeamish, as if their own dick was radioactive, okay for her but not them -- and he licked and sucked on her clit and she felt a great tight wave of warmth through her, her stomach clenching, was suddenly incredibly horny again. She ran her fingers through his hair and held on tight and ground herself against him and felt the heat of his mouth against her, and then, suddenly, he flicked his tongue gently against her clit and she came -- gasping and whimpering, when normally she was silent. 

He looked so proud of himself when he came back up, and overcome with a sudden foreign tenderness, she leaned forward and kissed him, tasting herself on his shiny face.

They showered together. Another first for her. He cleaned her gently, and then he pressed his fingers inside of her and rubbed his thumb along her, made her come again against his hand, with the water cascading down twinkling around them, holding her up pressed against his chest. “What about you, now?” she said, and he said, “You’re the star of the show here, Shiv, I live to serve,” and winked again, and she didn’t know how to feel. 

Sitting in fresh clothes, clean, in the afterglow, she could almost feel normal. She and Tom poured more scotch and she kept her phone off. She had lost all sense of time, but she began to feel the jetlag set in, the encroachment of time, coming for her. The whiskey helped a little, it kept the panic at bay, she focused on how Tom had looked at her, how he had felt thrusting so deep inside her when he came, how much he had wanted her. The delicate feeling of his fingers inside of her, the way he’d held her up in the shower, making sure she didn’t fall when her knees buckled. He had been so gentle. It was easier to think about that. And Tom chattered away, a comforting background white noise. She could think about herself, only, for once. She didn't want to have to think about her family. 

The night wore on, and she found she was actually enjoying Tom's company, his calm harmlessness, and then she heard a key in the door, and she and Tom exchanged a look, and she tossed back the rest of whiskey and braced herself, and Kendall came in. 

She gasped, and it was almost theatrically silly, but. She had been so successful at distracting herself, and she had known it was going to be bad, but she had been expecting -- what had she been expecting? She had come to him to be comforted. He was the heir. He was always number one, and he'd acted it for years, now, he was her big brother, he took care of her before he learned not to. But now: he was thinner than she’d ever seen him, even through the bulky coat he was wearing, he always wore to make himself look bigger. His face was puffy and waxy and almost grey, with swollen pouches beneath his sunken eyes. There were a set of stitches above his eyebrow, and a complex swirling pattern of fading bruising around them, green and yellow and red. She stood up, holding her hands to her mouth. As he came closer she saw that the white of his eye beneath the stitches was bright red, the hazel of his iris almost disappearing into it. His right arm was in a sling. He stood in the doorway, his shoulders collapsing in on themselves. 

“Shiv,” he said. He didn’t sound surprised. He didn’t sound anything. 

“Kendall,” she said, and her voice cracked. She walked toward him, but he steered around her, refusing to meet her eyes, and went to the bar and poured some whiskey into a tumbler and drank it, quickly, his back to them.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea, old boy?” Tom said, and Kendall turned to him and said, with that same flat, expressionless voice, “Tim, get the fuck out of my apartment.”

“Right-o,” Tom said, and left.

And then there was just the two of them. Kendall poured himself more whiskey, seeming to hold himself on the bar, not turning around. He was quiet. The foreign city around them twinkled and glittered through the windows. He was outlined in black in the centre of it all, a featureless lacuna.

“Kendall,” Shiv said again. “Kendall, please.”

He seemed to brace himself. He turned around. His glass was very full and he rested it against his forehead, above the stitches, with his eyes closed. The whiskey was amber and the glass was full and it sparkled brightly. And then he opened them, and his bloody eye was livid and obscene in the tasteful lighting, and he smiled mechanically.

“Shiv,” he said. “Nice to see you. How are you going to use this against me?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> horny jail 4 me


	7. Chapter 7

She took a step towards him and he looked at her and took another drink of whiskey, daring her. She was used to his defiance, his stubborn and compulsive need for control, but this was -- this was something different. He stared her down, but it didn’t reach his eyes, which were hollow and bruised and empty. 

“I --” she said.  _ I wouldn’t _ , she wanted to say. But again, that same treacherous voice:  _ I could. And I could do this job, and I could do it better than him _ . They were Roys, after all. Every decision a strategy. Every failure a weakness. Point, counterpoint. The foreign city twinkled around them in a dance of neon light against which Kendall was silhouetted, against the bar, the amber of his whiskey illuminated by the Scandinavian-style inlaid lighting, the crystal of the tumbler sparkling, next to his obscene bloodied eye. His right arm cradled next to his chest. His coat was still on.

She wanted to hold him. She wanted to be held. She wanted to punch him. She wanted her brother back.

Kendall raised his eyebrows, waiting, but she had nothing to say. He smiled, that same horrible empty smile. She felt scared by him. She didn’t recognise the person in front of her. 

“You can sleep on the couch, I guess,” he said. “Or see if there’s another unit you can take. I’m going to bed.”

He picked up the bottle of whiskey and walked into the bedroom, closing the door, and then --  _ shit _ , Shiv thought, she hadn’t made the bed. She closed her eyes. There was a silence, and then he called through the closed door: “Glad you had fun!” There was finally emotion in his voice: malice.

She wasn’t going to cry. She refused to. She balled up her fists.

She called Roman, who picked up, immediately.

“Fuck you, Shiv,” he said.

“Oh,  _ fuck me? _ Are you fucking kidding me --”

“Are  _ you _ fucking kidding  _ me _ \--”

“Oh my God, Roman, can you just--”

“What the fuck--”

“ _ Shut up!  _ Just  _ SHUT UP, _ ” she shrieked into the phone and then she looked at Kendall’s closed and silent door, and went into the bathroom. Roman, on the other end, was silent.

“Rome,” she said, once she was in the bathroom. She sat on the floor. There was a plush Egyptian cotton bathmat embroidered with Chinese characters that she didn’t understand, and that set the marble of the floor off perfectly. “This is really bad.”

Roman was quiet. Finally he said, “Dad is super pissed. Like steam coming out of his fucking dick. He said no one’s been able to get a hold of pissbaby. He even called  _ Mom,  _ Shiv. And what the fuck are you doing in Shanghai, anyway?”

“That’s not important. I just saw him.”

“Yeah? And?”

“I think --” she didn’t know what to say. She had to strategise. If Roman saw his chance to replace Kendall he’d take it. But this could be her chance too.

But also: she was scared. A word she’d learned long ago came suddenly into her head: zugzwang, chess, where you’re obligated to move at your own disadvantage. Your only option: the least bad choice.

“Is it the drinking?” Roman finally said. She searched his voice, through the crackle of connection, for sarcasm: but she didn’t find any. Still she didn’t speak.

“Come on, Shiv,” Roman said. “There’s no way you haven’t noticed. Even you.”

But she hadn’t, was the thing. She hadn’t.

“Yeah,” she said, finally, and it started to spill out of her in a torrent: “Rome, he came back from the hospital today, he looks like hell. His eye was all red -- he had bruises all over his face -- Tom said he had a  _ seizure _ , he was lying to him saying it was some shit from when he was a kid--”

“Who the fuck is Tom?”

“Oh, glad you’re picking up on the important shit here. Look, he came back and he looked like hell and he picked up a whiskey bottle and basically told me to go fuck myself. I’m really worried, Rome, he’s not acting like himself, it’s like -- he’s just  _ gone _ .”

“Our lucky day,” Roman said, startling a laugh out of her; his capacity for cruelty delighted her.

“No, but really. I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, tell him to call fucking Dad for starters. I don’t know. Pack him off to some rich asshole resort to dry out? I don’t get what the fucking problem is, he has everything he could possibly want, and he’s still--” Roman trailed off, but she heard the frustration and resentment in his voice.

“Yeah. But Rome. I think he’s really in trouble.”

He was silent on the other end. 

“So what do we do?”

“I don’t fucking know, Shiv. Can you get him home?”

“Oh shit. Wait. Who’s that friend of his? You know the douchey one that he loves, the college roommate?”

“Oh the big coke guy? Great idea, let’s just help him stop his heart --”

“No, shut up. We could get him to get Kendall to come back. Like as an excuse. Like hey Kendall I’m having a big party why don’t you fly back?”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know fucking know, Roman! I’m trying here. He won’t listen to us but he loves what’s his name. Stewy, right? He’ll listen to him, at least he’ll be in New York then, right? He’s gone completely off the fucking rails here, you didn’t  _ see him _ , he looks  _ dead -- _ ”

“Okay, okay, I get it, he’s gone full junkie. Okay. Well I don’t have any better ideas. But Dad is going to fucking kill him once he’s back.”

“Rome, I think -- I think he’s going to kill himself if he keeps going like this,” Shiv said. “I think this is our best option.”

“Okay. Okay fine. God he’s such a piece of shit. I think I have Stewy’s phone number. But you should call him. He likes girls.”

“For fuck’s sake. Fine,” Shiv said, and -- yeah, of course it was her, it would always have be fucking her cleaning up after her brothers -- but at least there was a plan, or something close to it.

“I’ll send his number. I’ll update Dad,” and here she felt relief, that it wouldn’t be her, and she wanted to thank Roman, but she didn’t.

She hung up. Roman sent her Stewy’s number. The apartment around her was silent. She could hear heavy, aggressive bass emanating from Kendall’s room. She tried the door. It was locked.

She sat, alone on the couch, still tender from earlier. 

She didn’t cry.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I'll end up winning and I won't know why /  
> I'm really trying to shine here, I'm really trying"  
> \--Karen, The National

But also: she was Shiv fucking Roy. Nobody told her what to do. Awoken by the adrenaline coursing through her, she sat on the plush midcentury modern couch decorated with plush cushions in a tastefully muted greige / red selection, in a row. She looked at Stewy’s number and realised that it was too late to call him. She chose a cushion and held it to her face and screamed into it. She was so tired that the world had begun to pitch and shiver around her. Aggressive bass thumped from Kendall’s room, making sleep impossible anyway, and it was such a fucking childish  _ fuck you _ . She could have gotten another unit, identical, sleeping in the same maximally-optimised space beneath him. But fuck him, actually, she’d come to fucking Shanghai because her fucking perv professor had backed her into a corner and felt her up, and she was not getting backed into any more corners, she was going to fix this if it killed her.

She went to Kendall’s door and started pounding on it. The Beastie Boys continued at what must have been a head-breaking volume inside; he couldn’t have been enjoying it. She knocked and knocked and when her knuckles were raw she started to pound on the door with open-handed slaps, and when her palms hurt she started kicking the door. Kendall was stubborn -- but so was she. 

“ _ What _ ,” he called through the door, finally, and she could hear the slur in his voice. “There’s no one else for you to fuck here, Shiv, unless you’re such a fucking slut you’d try your own brother.”

Her breath caught in her chest. She and Roman had a casual delight in cruelty, playing with each other, seeing how far they could push it, push each other: like a game of slaps, it was a childhood specialty daring each other. The theatre of being a Roy: how far are you willing to go? She was used to it; it hardly registered. But Kendall had a venomous streak that surfaced unpredictably like a snake: there was something cold in him that she saw flashes of that scared her. He could be vicious when he chose. There was something frightening about how far he’d go. She remembered his tenderness as a child. But he’d been suffocating it for years now and maybe it had finally choked and died. Maybe he’d truly become their father. But if that were the case, she wouldn’t be shouting through a door at him as he slurred and spat back like a cornered cat. Would she?

She kicked the door again.

“Open the fucking door, Kendall,” she screamed, over  _ Open Letter to NYC _ .

“Fuck off.”

“Kendall!” she shouted, and kicked the door again, hard. “Fuck! Kendall,  _ please _ , open the fucking door! This is fucking ridiculous.”

“Shiv, would you just  _ go away _ ,” he shouted, and his voice cracked on the end, and she thought: I know you’re in there.

“Kendall,” she said. Cards on the table. “Kendall, please. It’s just me. I’m your little sister. It’s okay. It’s just me.”

She leaned her forehead against the door, feeling the bass reverb through the solid walnut.  _ Please _ , she thought.  _ Please _ .

The lock clicked. She opened the door. She was hit by the smell of whiskey, B.O. The faint shameful smell of sex. Kendall was in stained sweats, shirtless, his right arm cradled limp like a baby bird against himself. He held the whiskey bottle in his left hand. Both his eyes were red, now, and his face was swollen and puffy, his eyes little pinpricks, and she realised he’d been crying. He was obviously drunk, swaying in place. He looked pathetic.

“Oh, Kendall,” she said. There were so many things she wanted to say. What happened to you. What have they done to you. What have you done to yourself. But they stuck in her throat, and instead she leaned in and circled her arms around his waist and tucked her head into his neck, grimy with sweat, the echoing stink of the ethanol poisoning him, and she felt his chest hitch and his face against her hair, and she realised he was crying, again.

“Shhhh,” she said. She didn’t know what else to say, what else to do. She had never been the nurturing type. But nobody else was, either. “Shhhhh. You’re okay. Shhhhhh.”

She walked him backwards to the bed until they were both sitting down, and he let himself be led, numbly. He held onto the whiskey bottle, using it to hide his face; she was on his other side. She took the bottle from him. She turned down the music. He still refused to look at her. She took a swig of the whiskey. It burned going down. There were Waterford crystal tumblers scattered around the room, that she hadn’t noticed before, and she picked two up and poured shots into them.

“Cheers, I guess,” she said, handing one to Kendall, and that startled a smile out of him, and he looked up at her and down at the glass and she saw his mouth twitch and she thought  _ there you are, I know you’re in there _ , and he said, finally, “To our good health,” and clinked against her glass. They drank. She sat on the floor so she was facing him. She didn’t know what the fuck she was supposed to do, but it seemed to be working, at least; Kendall seemed to be loosening, less held against himself.

“Yeah. Long may we reign,” she said, trying for a reaction, and he smiled at that and met her eyes. She still hated to see that livid scarlet eye, the stitches in his face, the yellowing bruising like poison surfacing through his skin. But he was looking at her now, at least.

She took a drink. He took a drink. 

“Sorry for fucking Tom in your bed,” she said, finally, and he laughed, and it was a real laugh, she was relieved.

“That was fucking gross, Shiv, really, him?” he said finally. But there was some animation in his voice, even if it was just condescension. It was something.

“He’s not so bad. He helped you,” she said, and then thought, ah fuck, but Kendall didn’t seem to notice. He poured more whiskey into the glass. She was worried, but: better this than a locked door. He splashed whiskey from the glass and she took it from him, gently, and set it on the floor. 

She had so many questions she wanted to ask. But there was some wild and raw streak of want in him, twinned with his coldness, his reckless ambition, and she saw, as if in a mirror, herself: whatever it took. It was their destiny. And always, in the back of her head:  _ I could do it, though. If I just had a chance. _

He was fumbling with something, and she noticed a white paper bag that he’d had half hidden beneath the bed, and she took it before he could and opened it, and saw the orange prescription bottles. She looked at him. He tipped his chin up and stared her down. That same cold stare she saw on TV, in the boardroom. But his hand, the free one, was shaking. And his face was still wet with tears.

“Kendall,” she said, “Come on, you’ve been drinking, you can’t.”

“I--” he said. And paused. 

“Kendall,” she said, again. 

He seemed to be shoring himself up, she saw his shoulders going up,  _ please _ , she thought, and she took his hand.

He looked at her, and down at their hands, entwined, and he looked at her again, and something in his face cracked. A tear ran down his cheek from his bloody eye.

“My head hurts,” he said, mumbling into his chest, barely audible. “I need it.”

“You don’t, Kendall, you don’t, it’s okay,” she said.

“No, you -- you don’t understand, it hurts so much.” He took a great deep shuddering breath, and more tears came, rolling down his wet face, and his chest hitched. And all Shiv could do was hold his hand. Choking through his own throat, through the tears: “I can’t make it stop.”

“You can,” she said, desperately, beginning to cry herself. “You don’t have to do this, Kendall, you don’t, you don’t --” 

“Shiv,” Kendall said. He tried to smile, condescendingly, but it didn’t quite catch. His face was somewhere between her brother and Kendall Roy. “It’s cute that you think I have a choice.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's all folks!! (unless im inspired to bring stewy in for an epilogue lmao). thanks for coming along for the ride


End file.
